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By Jared Spool and many others

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CleanJeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden’s “Sense & Respond”

Traditional marketing and communications often take the form of a one-way conversation. Things are put out into the market and it generally ends there. With the emergence of social media, a two-way conversation has also emerged. It leads to the opportun

CleanThe Tension of Art and Science When Communicating Complex User Research

Art versus Science is the quintessential Left Brain/Right Brain cage match. But in reality, math factors into great works of art as much as developing a treatment plan for a patient could be considered the doctor's design.
Andrew Shipe is a developer at

You can draw a direct line in the UX family tree from User Experience Design back to Human Computer Interaction. What if we could make the “computer” aspect of that interaction, feel less like a machine, and more like a human?
Robert Sens, the Lead

CleanAbout Face: How About.com Changed its Design Process and became Dotdash

According to Heraclitus, the only thing that remains constant is change. The internet itself has evolved exponentially over a relatively short amount of time. Few relics from the early days of the web remain, and those that have, have been forced to cha

Project management encompasses an important set of skills, such as communication, planning, and forecasting. But does someone need the title of project manager to actually do the work?
In Brett Harned’s book Project Management for Humans, he makes th

Design systems can organize and clarify a team’s design practice. Made of patterns and component libraries, they add a level of cohesion across designs. This, of course, can only occur once you have a design system in place. So how do you build one in

Storytelling is an essential form of human communication. You likely have a favorite story, something really memorable. The more that story is told and retold, the further it travels and the more influence it gains. A good story can be infectious.
Stori

There’s a stigma surrounding meetings. They’re often seen as unproductive wastes of time. But in Kevin Hoffman’s view, meetings are actually a design problem. In his upcoming book, Meeting Design for Managers, Makers, and Everyone, Kevin lays out

CleanEmpathy as a Service: Applying Service Design to the Homelessness Issue

Empathy. It’s an unavoidable word in the world of user experience design. Too often it is applied to designs in too narrow a fashion. Your empathy should come from the problem your design is solving, not measured in the level of frustration or delight

We often talk in terms of silos in organizations, where information isn’t readily shared and communication leaves something to be desired. Another way to think of a team who is heads-down working on the overall journey is to imagine swim lanes. Each d

Sometimes, the world of user experience design requires creative solutions. There are numerous methodologies and an even greater number of myths about where and when they are supposed to be used. Lean UX is one such process that is associated mostly wit

CleanSpirits, Claws, and Analytics — A study in superstition and science

Much like superstition, something that is believed to be an important metric may not apply to the reality of your product or service’s experience. Understanding the behavior of your users, introducing some science, is what leads to greater context and

If we keep adding functionality, we start to clutter our enterprise application’s design. That clutter can create a substantial burden on the user while obscuring the functionality we want them to use.
In this episode of the UIE Podcast, Amanda Linden

CleanThe Right Way to Train the Wrong Way to Research - UI Conference Podcast

When we’re training teams on our design methods, what we perceive as ‘proper’ may in fact become a hindrance. Our dogmatic approach to our processes may prevent people from ever employing the techniques. Is it better to do it the right way, or to

You’ve got a groundbreakingly innovative product idea, and you’ve assembled a crack team of designers. You know exactly what you want to do, but you’re unsure of how to do it. Without a framework to drive your product development, it’s Game Over

Design leaders are unsung revolutionaries. They’re often at the forefront of culture change, advocating for a new conversation about creativity and quality. The old one involved meetings, presentations, and top-down mandates, and little to no input fr

Creativity isn’t just about expressing yourself. It’s also about solving problems by putting disparate pieces together to form a new, unique whole. Practical Creativity fuels the everyday work and once-in-a-lifetime breakthroughs of designers, engin

The only job of application navigation is to get users to the right screen. Ideally, all of your users should find what they need in 10 seconds or less, and with only a few clicks. But many enterprise app navigation systems fall short. If you’re facin

For the longest time, making a great experience for the user was a business-strategy luxury item. A great product only had to work and ship. A great experience was a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Times have changed. The cost of delivering a product i

Products and service designers deal with complex design problems in equally complex markets. It’s hard to know which solutions are winners and which ones will fail. Fortunately, you can use simple design insights from biology to eliminate doubt and ri

Corporate life expects us to be experts, to know the answer to every question. We make “requirements”, which turn out to really be assumptions, but because we never call them assumptions, we never go about testing them. This is as much a social poli

Storytelling is a powerful way to measure our understanding of our users and their experiences. But unfortunately, we don't always get the story right. User experience rests more on listening to what the users want to tell us rather than the stories res

The challenges we have ahead require top talent to execute. Design leaders, who could lead our organizations to new heights, are a rare gem to find and recruit. A designed approach to hiring will change the caliber of your team. From first contact throu

Creating a culture of design is a special case of “organizational becoming,” touching teams, processes, and the delicate and difficult areas of culture and identity. Few of us feel equipped for such work. But “social technologies” are appearing

Adam Cutler explains how his team has built up the IBM Design organization, delivered a new design system, and created studios all over the world to tackle the world’s toughest enterprise user experience challenges.

CleanAdding New Features Can Literally be a Game Changer - UX Immersion Podcast

When your user gets value from your design, they’ll likely make using it into a habit. They’ll keep coming back, forming more habits as they continue to get results.
When we add new features, we often force them to break the habits they’ve careful

Gina Villavicencio and James Nixon discuss Marriott’s efforts in ensuring their brand isn’t lost across cultures, and how the organization is shifting to a more global perspective and locale-specific user research.

CleanNavigation: Oh, The Places You Were Trying to Go - UX Immersion Podcast

There’s a saying that you can’t know where you are going unless you know where you come from. Designing navigation for enterprise applications is a journey unto itself. One that UX Immersion speaker, Hagan Rivers is quite familiar with.
In this podc

Enterprise applications are massive, often unwieldy pieces of software. You get a sense they were never truly improved or updated, they just had a continuous string of features tacked on until it got to the point where they are almost impossible to use.

Organizations need to approach every problem and decision from a design viewpoint. Jared connects the UX Advantage themes together to form a framework for how we tackle the amazing challenges ahead of us.
Using his entertaining storytelling style, Jared

Traditionally, user research has taken on more of a scientific identity. You would do usability testing and research, take a ton of notes, and then compile all of your findings into a report. The effectiveness of that research depended on whether anyone

The expansion of the web past a desktop-based world into more of a multi-device ecosystem has caused organizations to re-evaluate almost everything they do. Style guides have had to grow to accommodate this new reality of multiple screens sizes and reso

The notion of being a “designer who can code” has been a prevalent topic in recent years. Delivering static PDFs and working in photoshop is seen as inefficient in some circles. Being able to create a clickable or even responsive mockup to present t

Understanding is what user experience as a field hinges upon. After all if you don’t understand how users are interacting with your product or service, you don’t know what to design for. But how, as a team, do you come to that understanding? Telling

Service design seems to go by an increasing array of names: Customer Experience, Cross-Channel UX, or even just “design thinking.” In most cases, these terms describe a holistic approach to your users’ and customers’ needs, no matter where or wh

The speed of Agile delivery fundamentally changes the work process and puts new demands on the design cycle. What happens when the notion of deadline dates is replaced with a continual stream of experience enhancements by everyone in the organization?

There are always burning questions about how to get organizations to be more design-centric and what better way to learn than from someone who has done it. Marc Rettig has been helping organizations make the transition for 30 years. In this podcast, Kar

The belief of public failure or marketplace irrelevance can drive an organization to change. How does a UX leader exploit this corporate fear? What transforms the momentum from fear into positive change within the organization?

Usability in products and websites is what most organizations strive for. The more usable the product, the more likely that people will use it. Through research and testing, you can root out many issues with clunky interactions that hinder the experienc

When some people hear the term Lean UX, they dismiss it as simply a nouveau buzzword. There can be some confusion as to its relationship to Agile, both the methodology and the adjective. Some of the biggest resistance came from the idea that Lean UX was

Product Managers are responsible for the success of a product. As we’ve seen, UX is not misaligned with business goals, in fact it helps achieve those goals. If UX has become a necessity in terms of a driver of business, product managers need to adapt

Traditional organizational silos are the nemesis of delivering great experiences. How do you scale multidisciplinary teams to enterprise size? Does a culture of design require a fundamental structural shift in how the organization operates?

Organizational change must be top down and bottom up. How do UX and design leaders influence the way executives make product and technology decisions? What defines true support as opposed to just lip service to a great experience?

Does moving to a design-infused culture mean that outside agency support is no longer valuable? What need does an outside viewpoint fill for design-led organizations? Or are agencies shifting to being an acqui-hire talent pool?

Global organizations can no longer project their corporate views of a customer experience upon a multitude of cultures. How do you embed the nuances and subtleties of each culture into a familiar experience regardless of where you are in the world?

It’s no secret that the content on your site needs to adapt to a variety of viewing environments. Responsive and Adaptive Design have been wonderful for ensuring your design flows and displays appropriately for the multitude of devices out there. But

CleanInventing the Yes Lawyer and Restructuring Incentives and Rewards

What does it take to create a culture of design? How does putting user experience first change the way organizations work?
Those are the questions being addressed at the UX Advantage conference. Jared Spool and Karen McGrane will be your hosts as they d

Animation in interfaces has traditionally been seen as purely decorative and unnecessary. There are real accessibility and usability concerns associated with a heavy reliance on Flash. Advances in CSS have allowed for sophisticated animations and transi

With the widespread adoption of Agile development methods, Lean UX has grown in popularity in the user experience world. It’s built around small, collaborative, cross-functional teams and is an extremely useful approach for startups and smaller teams.

A website can be made up of relatively complex pieces. You have multiple pages, images, maybe some JavaScript, and it all needs to come together to create this larger experience. But as with things in nature, it can be broken down even further than that

A customer’s journey may begin on your website or maybe it begins in a physical retail location. But it more than likely won’t end there. Many organizations have a variety of touchpoints where their customers can interact with them. Understanding wh

Offering a mobile design is essential in today’s web. Having an app, however, can be a hotly contested issue. The cries of, “we need to be in the app store!” are heard coming from corner offices. While having a presence there can be beneficial, yo

Responsive web design's combination of fluid grids and media queries has really changed the design and development process. It’s an elegant way to ensure that one set of code can display appropriately across devices. It is, however, a bit of a problem

Media queries shape and form a web page to display on multiple screen sizes. That’s the core of responsive web design. Users can maintain the same level of experience that they get on the desktop even when they switch to a smaller device. The theory o

Responsive web design is widely regarded as a must when designing for multiple devices. With just one code base, instead of multiple sites, you can more efficiently make use of your resources. But, how your design looks is only a piece of the overall ex

Accessibility is often focused on how to design and build digital products or physical spaces. But understanding the people with disabilities who will use those products is just as important. Enter ethnography and the importance of research that goes

User experience, as it has come to be known and understood, is generally associated with the digital space. Designers and developers working in concert to make a site, app, or digital product more usable and well designed. However, a user’s interactio

Have you seen style tiles, element collages, or pattern libraries? These are just a few examples of how designers are reacting to the explosion of devices and interface sizes. After all, thinking about the parts of a “page”—not just the sum of tho

The so called Digital Divide is increasingly being filled with mobile devices. Because of that, you need an understanding of how your designs are appearing and behaving on smaller screens. Cyd Harrell is an expert on user research, and the one we to tur

What’s going to make your whole company focus on mobile? How do people interact with their mobiles device? How can you design for this new reality and even create experiences that translate from mobile to laptop to TV?

Why don’t design students coming out of school know about responsive design or creating mobile apps? Why are our self-taught hackers and C.S. grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation? It’s not that schools or profe

Mobile phones are like research platforms in our pockets. With the right strategy, we can quickly understand our users’ behavior, wherever they are. And given the ubiquity of mobile usage — even among hard-to-reach populations — we as UX designers

By now, companies know they need to be “on mobile.” But should that experience be a native app, a mobile web app, or something in between? The answer rarely is such a simple choice. And if you’ve ever entered into mobile discussions with a series

Many teams follow a linear design process with a big reveal—ta-da!—once the aesthetics, layout, and flow are “ready” for client feedback. Weeks later, the front-end developer enters to turn an approved design into a responsive site that function

Integrating UX into an Agile workflow has historically been a bit of a challenge. This could be due to a general lack of communication with the development team, or not feeling like the proper time or value is given to UX within the organization. Throug

WordPress powers over 25 million sites with more than 14 billion pages viewed each month, making it one of the most popular web publishing platforms. Imagine if every one of those sites was accessible. Joe O’Connor has been a leader in making that hap

The concept of strategy can be fuzzy at best. And the word strategy tends to hold a different meaning depending on who you’re talking to. Jim Kalbach says that strategy needs to show causality. He defines it as a hypothesis of a desired position, and

Product roadmaps are a useful tool for managers and the development they oversee. Usability testing and research informs user experience decisions. Both of these goals, in the end, benefit the users. So why can’t your process contribute to both of the

The web is everywhere. It’s on our desks, in our pockets, and on screens of all sizes. The complexity involved with building a website grows with each new device it must support. This cross-platform consistency requirement makes a concrete, static des

Web accessibility takes place on a foundation of technologies, the most common of which are developed and maintained by the Worldwide Web Consortium, or W3C. Its success is dependent on how well these underlying technologies support accessible user expe

Lately, Jared Spool has been mulling over what he defines as deliverables and artifacts in the design process. The idea is that deliverables are more authoritative and complete, whereas artifacts are more conversational and exploratory. Scenarios are an

User experience is rarely something you do completely alone. Even if people on the team don’t necessarily focus on UX, they could be indirectly acting in favor of it. Sometimes it comes from a lack of understanding exactly what user experience is or m

User Experience is really all about delighting your users. You want them to accomplish tasks with ease and not encounter any roadblocks that are a direct result of your design. Many of the delightful things about an app or interface go unnoticed because

Oftentimes really simple changes can have dramatic effects on a user’s ability to interpret data. Stephen cites the many examples of designers taking stabs at airline boarding pass redesigns and the evolution Target’s Pharmacy prescription bottle we

When you break down written language, it’s really just a carefully crafted set of tiny symbols. It’s easy to dismiss these meticulous creations in daily life as simply, reading. The shape, readability, and size of these symbols are all factors in ef

In traditional website design and development it’s common to start with the design and add your content later in the process. You may even use “lorem ipsum” as a placeholder to know where the content eventually needs to live. This causes the conte

In the realm of user experience, disciplines and titles can take on different meanings. Determining buzzword jargon from actual, useful distinctions and processes is sometimes a bit tricky. The term Service Design has been with us for a while now. Some

Luke says it’s necessary to look at how your service or product is framed in the broader picture. Most are built upon tradition web structures, and then “mobilized” now that smartphones and tablet growth has exploded. He compares the difference be

In traditional development environments, requirements are what you base the project’s direction on. However, requirements assume that you know what you’re doing and why you’re building it. Substituting your thinking to adopt a hypothesis approach

Accessibility research can help us better understand how people with disabilities use the web and what we in product design and development can do to make that experience more successful and enjoyable. However, accessibility research is often carried ou

The goal of any site is to have great, compelling content. But what constitutes great content? How is the success of a blog post or a video measured? How can you be sure the time and effort put into crafting your content is providing an adequate return

If you work in user experience or accessibility, you probably spend part of your time on advocacy–making the case for a new design idea or a new way of working. Lawsuits are the ultimate way to get two sides to come to an agreement, but it’s also an

If you work in media broadcasting or telecommunications you have probably heard of the U.S. legislation called CVAA, shorthand for the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. This law, signed by President Obama in October 2010, seeks to

Sharron Rush heads the Easy Checks project at the Web Accessibility Initiative. These simple steps help you get an idea of whether a site meets some of the basics for good accessibility, without any special technology or tools. She joins Whitney Quesenb

In this premiere episode of A Podcast for Everyone, Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery speak with UIE's Adam Churchill about the book that inspired the podcast, and give a preview of what they will be talking about in upcoming episodes.

The notion that “wireframes are dead” has been coming up every so often over the past few years. In truth, wireframes are still a valuable way for teams to communicate. Building up scenarios through state changes helps to both show and define a user

Ultimately, your content is the reason users visit your site. Taxonomy can build a structure underneath that content, making it much more dynamic. By employing a layer of taxonomy, your CMS can better understand the relationships between the content. Th

The web is no longer fixed width. Designs are more malleable than ever because of fluid grids, media queries, and everything else that comes with responsive web design. This makes using static photoshop comps as a deliverable unmanageable. Design workfl

Frameworks and design patterns are no strangers in the world of web design. As responsive web design becomes common practice, making sure these templates work across every imaginable screen and device is trickier. There have been attempts to break down

With the mobile web, specifically m dot sites increasingly becoming a thing of the past, responsive web design has become common practice. The ability for your site to display across screen sizes and devices, reduces development time and allows for one

The “designer who can code” has been dubbed the elusive unicorn of the UX realm. But more important than being equally good at both skill sets is being able to communicate with the other side. If designers understand even a little bit about code it

Responsive web design seems to come up in every other discussion or article about UX these days. And rightfully so as it’s an elegant way to make sure your design adapts to the multitude of devices on the market. But with the Internet of Things loomin

There’s a traditional way of building a product. Normally there’s a huge time investment made as you come up with the idea, design, build and re-build until it’s released. At this point you’re hoping this solution solves the users’ problems, a

As responsive web design becomes more prevalent, our approach to designing for the web is changing. With former assumptions, as dismissive as they may have been, that the web was a fixed width, it was easier to have a more linear workflow. With the need

Getting great participants for usability studies can provide invaluable insights for your design process. But if you aren’t doing your own recruiting, you could be missing out on additional important information. Dana Chisnell has learned that the bes

Ensuring that your site is responsive or adaptive is becoming essential to your mobile design strategy. With the plethora of devices available, users want to be able to access your site on whichever one they’re using. The days of the separate mobile s

As much as we may like to pretend, there is nothing natural about usability testing. There’s always a level of concentration involved that likely wouldn’t be present in a natural setting. This “unnaturalness” is magnified when testing mobile app

Nowadays, design is an increasingly important business tool. As Jared Spool reminds us, Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, largely based upon continually engaging in good design. A great user experience can be a differentiator in the bu

Technology changes quickly. A lot of organizations struggle to keep up with this change. It’s not just mobile design that’s throwing a wrench in the spokes. Content strategy and information architecture are more important than ever in this changing,

In considering your user's experience with your design, keep in mind that there's a difference between something looking good and being good. But how do you determine good? How can you measure it? If, for example, you’re a print company building a dig

Given the amount of communications a user takes in on a daily basis, how you speak to them is incredibly important. The “voice” a company uses contributes to the establishment of the brand as well a creates a distinguishing identifier that sets it a

Creating visualizations from data can be a powerful and intriguing way to present findings. But way too many design teams sit on vast amounts of data. They also spend entirely too much time making static images rather than interactive tools.

Getting two people to agree on something is a difficult task in any aspect of life. Getting a whole team to agree on a design, where underlying feelings, ownership, and organizational hierarchy are involved, can be an even greater challenge. That’s no

Dan believes that collaboration and conflict—that’s right, conflict—are the basis for good design. The book itself evolved from his Surviving Design Projects card game. Dan joins us for this podcast to discuss his book, and his thinking around col

Steve’s book is a distillation of his years of experience conducting research with users. Somehow existing as both a handbook of sorts and as a casual conversation with one of the sharpest minds in the field, it’s a must-have for anyone thinking abo

In some scenarios, getting a user to convert or react to a call to action is the desired outcome. It means your design and experience work. But if users are coming to and then quickly leaving your site, what are they really experiencing? If they don’t

UX folks often have to sell the importance of the field to stakeholders. That’s also the case with user research. The costs and time associated with starting a research program, and actually interacting with users, are sources of a lot of friction. Or

Critique is often confused with being negative and critical. However, the basis of critique is communication. Having strongly grounded communication is necessary for any relationship in life, work related or not.

Culling through massive amounts of data is a headache. A dense table of aggregated data points can be useful in theory, but the manner in which it’s displayed is often a hindrance. Even more than that, showing that data in a chart or graph is confusin

Everyone wants to be innovative, to be the next iPhone, or Google. Innovation in itself is a tricky proposition. There’s really no way to aim for it as a goal and it’s not something you can declare you’re going to achieve. Many companies and produ

It’s common in the current technological landscape for teams to have remote members. Firing up a Skype session to join the whole team in a meeting is easy. However, having a remote element to your team is not without complications. There can be hurdl

Scenarios can represent the ideal picture of a user’s experience with a product or service because you can see how and when they’ll interact. However, a scenario is often missing the details of what's going on at this moment in time and that can be

Do you think about the ringer on your phone and the ability to turn it off? Dan Saffer uses this example to kick off his book Microinteractions. Silencing the ringer on your phone is a common feature. If that feature is clunky or hard to find it interfe

Assumptions tend to be the downfall of many research projects. Making design decisions based on generalizations of what people are likely to do leads to surprises once you finally get your product in front of actual users. The result? Rework and frustra

Typography wears many hats in the user experience world. It’s part of the overall look of the visual design. It can convey tone and meaning of the content. Well set type can improve the user experience through readability and be an important piece of

Facilitation is an important skill, whether with collocated or remote teams. It drives conversation and collaboration. The ability to facilitate well is integral when conducting participatory design activities, giving a presentation, or even giving a vi

Here at UIE we’ve amassed quite a library, and we’re adding to it all the time. One of the more recent additions is Margot Bloomstein’s book Content Strategy at Work. The subtitle of Margot’s book is “Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Int

The world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of iPad applications and successful online businesses

CleanSteph Hay - Building Trust with Your Users through Messaging and Copy

Ever wonder how many “World’s Best Coffee” signs exist in the world? The world is a big place, so that claim may or may not be entirely accurate. These days, with social media being so prevalent, it’s important that your messaging is truthful an

Shared understanding is important to any team working towards a common goal. Ensuring every member of the team is on the same page can be difficult. Sketching is a quick, lightweight method for communicating design ideas or interactions. Starting with s

A beautiful design means little if it’s not useful. Content is the key to making it useful. From the outset of the design process, you must consider the content for the site. Members of the design and development teams should work along side the conte

The proliferation of mobile devices has made it necessary to rethink your web experiences. The mobile phone and tablet, along with retina displays, have substantially changed how a user experiences your design. Responsive web design has emerged as a sol

With the emergence of techniques like responsive web design, many of the traditional prototyping methods become difficult to employ. Sketches and wireframes have in some cases given way to HTML and CSS prototyping so that users and clients can experienc

Accessibility is important, but somewhere along the way it got an undeserved reputation for being ugly, costly, and driven only by technical-compliance requirements. Making it an integral part of your design early creates something that is beautiful, in

As more web capable devices hit the market, designers need to consider where and how their designs will be seen. Unfortunately, the same consideration isn't always made when it comes to content. With design changing so much in a multichannel environment

Des Traynor is an expert on crafting microcopy. In his virtual seminar, Microcopy That Strengthens your Design’s Experience, Des identifies the key questions to ask when creating microcopy so that it doesn’t get lost or created by accident. The audi

Building a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which

What makes a user want to download an app in the first place? Ideally, it’s the promise of fulfilling a goal or need for the user. With the hundreds of thousands of options available, and the immediacy of the mobile context, you have a small window of

Mobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.

The ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you

Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.

With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers i

We’ve all sat through terrible meetings before. Part of what makes those meetings so bad is poor communication. Being present in a meeting doesn’t guarantee that your attendees will retain the important information from the meeting, or feel like the

Websites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increas

Most interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhyth

When smartphones and tablets first emerged, designers focused on channel differences like screen size in order to understand the basics in this new area. It’s time to set aside channel-centric planning and think of a user’s context first.

If we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get

Science fiction films often take liberties with the technology that they display. After all, it is fiction. Though they can make up essentially whatever they want, technologies still need to be somewhat realistic to the audience. This influences the way

In the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where t

Speed and performance are a critical aspect of mobile design. Using media queries to design your site responsively is a great way to ensure proper display on mobile devices. But just shrinking a desktop site to work on a mobile device can affect perform

“Meetings are a waste of time.” “Meetings, ugh—I have real work to do.” Heard these? The perception of meetings worsens when you have an unproductive one. The entire team feels like their time could have been better spent.

In any website, there’s a lot of thought that goes into the visual design. But a great visual design is worthless if the site isn't useful. If the content is confusing, poorly constructed, or even just missing, your users are going to have a horrible

SharePoint is a powerful tool, but the complexity associated with it can leave users overwhelmed. Users trying to manage content and share information through SharePoint often experience frustration. Seeing where UX fits within SharePoint isn’t always

Scenarios are a powerful tool in the design process. They focus on the user experience in its entirety, giving the reason a user is engaging with your product or service. Scenarios allow you to think about the gaps between the experiences. They are grea

Prototyping is an effective way to communicate design ideas. Static PDFs, PSDs, and wireframes can help get your point across but aren’t dynamic. Usually, any necessary changes are logged away as to-dos. They’re then taken back, fixed, and presented

Context is an important consideration in designing a mobile experience. As new devices enter the market, designers have to contend with new form factors and consider things such as ergonomics. Even things such as Apple’s retina displays affect approac

Your content is visible practically everywhere. Content strategists need to structure content to allow for viewing on an array of devices. What does that mean for your content management system? And what do you need to build into your content to make it

Structure aids collaboration and helps achieve consensus. If everyone is participating in a structured environment, you begin with a greater level of understanding. Using a design studio as a process can get everyone on the team communicating and moving

It’s difficult to predict how users will access your designs and your content. More and more, people are connecting to the internet through some sort of mobile device. Using the latest advances in HTML and CSS can leave aspects of your site incompatib

It’s impossible to design something if you don’t know who you’re designing for. Developing personas through user research is a great way to create a portrait of your users. But once you have your personas, what do you do with them? That’s a ques

Critique is an integral part of the design process. Contrasting from feedback, critique is more focused and specific. Often, rather than a gut reaction, it is framed within the context of a dialogue. It is centered around arriving at an understanding.

Nathan discusses how the team at EightShapes brought their modular philosophy to creating rich interactive prototypes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. He explains how, through modular thinking, they were able to write scripts that chunked aspects of the

Reputation is everything. On sites where users can rate and review products or services, the result is, well, reputation. But a problem can arise when ratings aren’t accompanied by a qualifying review. A user could have had a negative experience with

A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurate

Content is everywhere. With the amount of content users are confronted with everyday it can be challenging to garner their attention. Compounding this problem is the fact that designers and developers are often tasked with writing content that end user

Getting data from your users is a fundamental part of creating great user experiences. Surveys are a great way to get feedback and learn about your users. The problem is everyone has sat through a painful, monotonous survey that asked a series of frustr

A dashboard is often the first screen that a user sees in your UI. The importance of visual design and data visualizations is high. But good looks aside, the dashboard has to meet the users’ needs. Beautiful dashboards are futile if the presented info

Change is always an interruption. For those switching to an Agile process, the transition doesn’t always go so smoothly. Suddenly, with things moving so quickly, the role of UX gets lost in the shuffle. User experience is often disregarded in Agile de

CleanNoah Iliinsky - Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations A Virtual Seminar Follow-up

The right data can be more effective than words when it comes to telling a story. Even if you have the data, you have to present it in the correct manner. Choosing the right axes, colors and placement are all a big part of putting together a great visua

Touch screen devices are commonplace. It's now expected that your mobile experience work as well as, if not better than, your desktop experience. With faster connection speeds, cameras, GPS, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, we can deliver information to

With mobile, you simply can't have as much content on your pages as you do on the desktop. Intranet access within enterprises is crucial and accessing it with mobile devices is beneficial. However, the vast amount of pages and content is cumbersome and

Lean UX can eliminate the contractual obligations inherent with specification documents and other deliverables. Designers and developers find it frustrating to put so much effort into a project then not see it ship at the end. Using the Lean UX process,

There's a belief that user experience insight is lacking in Agile development. Trying to shoehorn UX practices into an Agile process results in a lot of frustration. Often, developers build stuff faster than the designers can design it. The whole proces

Technologies are often misunderstood at their outset. This misunderstanding leads to a lack of adoption. This lack of adoption leads to the technology not reaching it’s full potential or not being utilized in useful ways. This is essentially what happ

Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Ye

Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The

The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not yo

A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can

CleanJeff Gothelf - Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business A Virtual Seminar Follow-up

The goal of Lean UX is to take the focus of user-centered design off of documentation and put it squarely on the experience. The way to do this is to view any design idea as a hypothesis. With a focus on the experience, you can validate or invalidate th

The Agile development process is accused often of being too focused on delivery over the user experience. But that’s not to say that Agile is the bane of UX. Anders Ramsay believes it’s important to distinguish between Agile methods and Agile values

While the traditional “mouse and cursor” interfaces are still in use, many of us are becoming familiar with touch-based interactions. The power and capabilities of mobile and tablet devices is growing. Often, these devices are the more convenient al

A designer can never have too many tools and methods for creating their designs. Many times conveying interactions in a static wireframe is difficult. So designers have turned to HTML and CSS to create wireframes and prototypes to provide a richer inter

The term Lean UX is bandied about quite a bit these days. Along with it, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this is just a buzzword, a new way of working, or simply a new description for what people in the UX realm already do. Jeff Gothelf o

UX professionals have made a lot of progress in large organizations. Companies realize the importance of connecting with their users more and more. User research is becoming firmly rooted in many organizations as companies try to produce better products

Gamestorming can allow collaboration to happen. It quickly gets a lot of people working together, sharing ideas, and getting creative. Words may be tricky because you're not certain if someone has interpreted what you’ve said the way you meant it. The

CleanJeff Patton - Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile and UX Together

Story mapping is a way to build a model of user experiences. More than that, in the Agile context, it allows you to tactically plan for what should go into each release. It is a way to get everyone on the team thinking and talking about user experience.

Mobile is the “hot topic” these days. It’s increasingly at the front of designers’ minds. In a world where the power and capabilities of the device in your pocket are so great, the possibilities become somewhat astounding. The mobile landscape i

It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data - especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things. When dashboards and widgets are employed, the goal is to make your life easier, b

As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be pa

With the amount of content coming at you from all sides, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and present it in a logical fashion. Curation allows you to create order out of all the chaos. Borrowed from the world of museums, curating your content

Everybody strives to arrive at the end of a project with a great design. But often times the “brilliant idea” isn’t easy to communicate and takes a long time to develop. Brandon Schauer believes that you can develop techniques to help this communi

CleanCennydd Bowles - UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited

Developing a good set of fundamentals is key to successful user experience design. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of design, just possessing the skills isn’t enough. It will prove difficult for you to chang

You can’t ask people what they want. They can’t tell you. The answer is almost always narrow in focus, concerned with the here and now rather than the future. How do you get them to give you the observations you need to design what they will want? C

A good starting point is crucial. It sets the tone for everything that comes after. All too often, projects are unsuccessful or labor through growing pains because the importance of this starting point was overlooked. When done right, the kickoff to a p

CleanStephanie Sullivan Rewis and Greg Rewis - What Designers Need to Know About HTML5 and CSS3

The introduction of CSS3 and HTML5 brought with it a host of new capabilities. With most modern browsers supporting CSS3 and HTML5, implementing them into your designs is becoming easier. Understanding the things that are now possible with these new sta

Combining compelling storytelling with research data can help you craft realistic scenarios to guide your design process. Getting to know the specific needs of your users will allow you to address any potential problems they may have. As a consultant, K

Incorporating CSS3 into your designs allows you to create innovative designs with less code and reliance on images. The level of compatibility with many of the browser options out there is already impressive and it continues to grow. Taking advantage of

Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. Scenarios are the stories that drive design decisions. They put the design into the context of how and why the user will interact with it. Kim Goodwin

Prototypes help, be they paper, wireframes or PDFs, to exhibit a design idea. They allow you to communicate your idea visually and test aspects of the design. As effective as they are, they have their limitations. Nathan Curtis of EightShapes uses HTML

Mobile design is becoming more important everyday. As the technology and capabilities get better so does the users’ experience. Taking advantage of this technology affords you to opportunity to create experiences that your users have only dreamed of.

Great design principles guide your team to creating designs that delight your users. Having a set of great principles will allow your team to turn ordinary design into extraordinary design. But not everyone has great design principles. What even constit

Conducting research and gathering data are crucial parts in the process of creating great design. But once you have all of the data, what do you do with it? How do you know you’re extracting the right conclusions and not leaving anything important on

Analyzing data is a great way to make design decisions. But when your analytics log contains billions of clicks, how do you distinguish which ones you should use in forming those decisions? Users’ behavior and activity can provide you with great infor

“Thinking mobile” goes beyond scaling down an existing app to fit a smaller screen or making decisions about what content to include. Because the app can be used anywhere by nature and the interface is manipulated with thumbs and fingers, there are

The surge in mobile technology is incredible. Manufacturers ship over a million touchscreen phones every day. These devices allow people to interact with the web in new ways. Streamlining your design for mobile helps you focus on what is absolutely nec

Mike Lee is the Senior Digital Strategy Advisor at AARP. With much of the organization’s 53-year heritage being within “traditional” media realms, shifting it’s publishing and broadcast businesses into the online world is no small task. In this

Information Visualization uses the brain’s innate ability to recognize patterns to create visual representations of data. When you see a great visualization, it’s as if you are looking through the eyes of an expert. Noah Iliinsky gives examples of t

Whether it's on the design side or development side there are tricks and techniques you can benefit from. Often, these tips can save you time and frustration. You may not even be aware of them unless someone actually shows them to you. Being able to see

More types of devices are accessing your web content everyday. Have you figured out how to accommodate them? Ethan Marcotte is leading the charge in this area, with his work on Responsive Design, which can help your content scale and adapt to new device

Translating information and data into a useful visualization is challenging. When creating information visualizations, as with any design process, it’s imperative to keep your audience in mind. With quality visualizations, they can understand and anal

Stephen Anderson, designer and creator of the Mental Notes card deck, believes your users must be emotionally engaged if you want them to exhibit a certain behavior. Stephen uses simple visual representations to help people make choices and understand c

CleanBryan Veloso and Dan Rubin - Peeking Over the Shoulder of Design Experts

Certain tips and tricks you can only learn from watching the best in the field do what they do. Peeking over the shoulder of an expert can teach you valuable techniques and insights that you won’t find in any book. That is exactly how the designers at

Information architecture exists in all levels of design, from the most abstract to the most concrete. Everything from thinking about the content of the site right down to embedding a navigation strategy determines the structure of a website. Through his

With mobile quickly emerging as a viable and practical source of web based content, designers need to know how to adapt and keep up. With the sheer number of different devices out there it can be a daunting prospect. Josh joins Jared Spool in this podca

CleanDesigning for Mice and Men: UI Across Platforms - Q&A with Bill Scott

The number of places that you can access the web grows every day. But are you designing for it? How do your users see your content? And more importantly, how are they interacting with it? Bill Scott joins Jared Spool and discusses the challenges and a f

CleanSharing Stories as Data: Building PatientsLikeMe’s Community - Q&A with Kate Brigham

Kate Brigham is the Patient Experience Manager at PatientsLikeMe. Rather than focusing solely on forums and discussion, she has helped create an environment that encourages sharing amongst the patients. In this podcast, Kate talks to Jared Spool about h

How do you bridge the gap between the search engine and your site? You want that transition to be as smooth and natural for your users as possible. Ideally, they would start with their search, arrive at your site and accomplish what they set out to. Oft

Visual design is often considered an artistic realm. Many times people shy away from design or limit their involvement despite being completely capable of creating a great design. Learning the basics of design can help dispel the notion that it is only

Web applications live in a strange world: half application, half website. Making a command look like a command can be tricky. Do you make it a button? Should it be a link? David discusses a number of considerations for creating or updating your applicat

CleanThe Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization on the Same Page with Tamara Adlin

Effective communication is the basis for keeping your team organized. But how can you be certain that everyone in your organization is on the same page when it comes to business goals, objectives and the user experience perspective? Using personas can

CleanAnswered! Your Top Questions on Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

Knowing exactly how to design web forms is a struggle. Forms are often a critical step in a user’s journey. It’s easy to frustrate them if your forms aren’t well thought out or well crafted. Luckily, Luke Wroblewski is one of the world’s foremos

When approaching your information architecture, you’ll realize most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. You need to figure out which works best for your audience, your content, and your project’s goal. Donna Spencer shows you the

Design has made a lot of progress in the corporate landscape over the past decade, but many designers still find themselves justifying their existence on a fairly regular basis. In Kim Goodwin’s talk, “Getting Design Into the Corporate DNA” from t

Prototyping is an iterative process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works, what needs improving, and opportunities for new ideas. Tune in to this podcast to hear Todd Zaki Warfel talk about prototyping.

For years, the mobile web experience was little more than an afterthought as most design teams focused on catering their designs to the desktop. As Luke Wroblewski explains in his session “Why You Should Design for Mobile First” from the User Interf

Scenarios are comprehensive stories that describe the way a persona would interacts with your product or service. If there is a grand dutchess of personas, scenarios, and design processes, it's Kim Goodwin. That's why we asked Kim to do a workshop on tu

Today we're revisiting search patterns by sharing the followup podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark Burrell of Endeca. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the previous Virtual Seminar. Included in the full post are a few highlights from

This week, calling in from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, is Grady Kelly. Grady is inspired by Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin. He wants to know how UX professionals can work to become indispensable team members and not just another cog in the machine.

Web applications can get wild. You know the kind; something that's on your corporate intranet with an obscure purpose, hundreds of screens and some kind of navigation kudzu growing in every direction. Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite wranglers of suc

Our guest Jon Wold from Oslo brings up a really great point about test results: It’s hard to report on problems without providing suggestions for correcting the problems you observe in testing. Tune in to get Jared and Robert's suggestions on the topi

It's becoming common to see behavioral cues in everyday web applications. Stephen Anderson is the first person we think of when it comes to these kinds of interactions. Stephen is an independent consultant and creator of the Mental Notes, a set of refer

We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal to host a UI

It seems we've failed to offend our international audience sufficiently, so this week we'll try again by chatting with Jay Vidyarthi, a designer hailing form Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jay is working on a project with social design aspects. He's helpin

Bill Scott's Designing for Interesting Moments was one of the highlights of the first stop on UIE's Web App Masters tour, in San Diego. We wanted everyone to benefit from his research into web interactions, so we're bringing you this audio and visual sa

This week, Mohammed Alaa calls in from Egypt with questions about convincing stakeholders of the value of UX and about improving his own UX skills. Robert Hoekman and Jared Spool are back with another episode of Userability!

Ken Kellogg, the Director of User Research at Marriott International, sits down with Jared Spool to discuss the process of design and research that lay beneath a web site that generated $6.5 billion in revenues in 2009.

Jason Fried brings a unique viewpoint to any design discussion, one informed by years of success with his company, 37signals. Recently, Jared Spool was able to chat with Jason about 37signals' current work. If you're joining us at the UIE Web App Master

Bill Scott chats with Jared Spool about rich interactions, his new book about them, and his deep history with them at Sabre, Yahoo! and now Netflix. Bill is one of the stellar presenters scheduled for all four cities on the UIE Web App Masters Tour.

The world's foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design. It's no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events like our upcoming Web App Masters Tour. Jared Spool sat down with Luke to d

In this podcast, Jared Spool sits down with Peter Morville to answer many excellent questions from the recent Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns virtual seminar. Even if you did not attend, there's a lot of great information in this podcast.

We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, designing we

Back in October, we asked usability testing expert Beth Loring to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to Effectively Moderate Usability Tests. As is often the case, we got lots of great questions from the live audience, but just couldn’t get to them

User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you're set. We held a Virtual Seminar with Dana Chisnell to discuss recruiting for usability testing, and this is t

How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That's what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott has a lot of great ideas for your team from his years of research into the habits of highly innovative teams. In addition to t

What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals.

Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We're happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip

Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we've asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Todd sa

One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry's no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Gerry joins us in this podc

Leah Buley brings us her insight to getting to the good design faster in your process and improving the input you receive from your organization. There are some great ideas here that you should listen to.

This week we have our longest, and certainly one of our most interesting episodes to date. Jared and Robert met Joshua Muskovitz on the IxDA discussion list when Josh posted an innocent-enough question to the list: what do you call someone who sits squa

A couple of weeks ago we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Ethan Marcotte from Happy Cog West, a designer of beautiful websites. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so A

Last month we held a UIE Virtual Seminar where I presented my talk, Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so, with a little

This week a question from one of the world's most well-read cities fittingly enquires about the must-read books in design. Damon Dimmock asks Jared and Robert to recommend their top three books on design.

(Audio podcast edition) Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon: On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are

Robert Hoekman, Jr. recently joined us for a Virtual Seminar on Interaction Design Frameworks, called, Web Anatomy: Interaction Design with Frameworks. The concept is a new one, and Robert and I are exploring and introducing the concept in new book due

This week's guest Dana asks Jared and Robert, "What can I do to court favor with design teams to let them know that I, as the usability consultant, am not just an enforcer, but I'm on their side and that we can learn from one another?"

This week I wanted to share my interview with Brian Kalma, Director of User Experience and Web Strategy for darling of Internet retail, Zappos.com. In case you've somehow missed out on their meteoric rise to top of online retail, now conducting over a b

This week Robert Hoekman, Jr joins us to discuss a new design process he's been developing called "Design Frameworks." Drawn loosely from the idea of the Frameworks that software developers use to more efficiently build software, design frameworks are a

This week's episode features a surprise guest for Jared and Robert. Actually, every guest is a surprise, but this one is a surprise and an ambush by a friend of UIE, the always entertaining Scott Berkun. Scott wanted to know, why twenty years beyond The

This week, Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. spoke to Mile Dowsett from Cambridge, UK who is stratling the worlds of desktop and web-based applications. He wanted to know, "What do you think is the most important or significant UX deliverable/activity

This week we are happy to share with you a followup podcast to our recent Virtual Seminar with Jeff Patton, one of the world's foremost teachers and consultants on the agile development process. If you missed the seminar, don't worry, if you're interest

Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. James Box and Richard Rutter of Clearleft share their successful process of creating rough interactive prototypes for clients when crea

If you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Ajax, like most techniques and technologies on the web are what you make of them.
That's why I asked Derek Featherstone to speak with me about his latest

This week we chat with out friend Luke Wroblewski about Web Form Design. He discussed some of the most frequent questions he gets asked about form design considerations, since having penned a popular book on the subject. He offered a lot of helpful advi

Dealing with real-life web app production isn't as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so t

This week our long time friend Molly Holzschlag joins us to discuss the cutting edge of web standards as they apply to web application development. Listen in while we talk about the effects that HTML 5, ECMAScript and other standards will have on the we

We love to talk to Steve Mulder (from Molecular) and Riccardo La Rosa (from Isobar) about building out a Web 2.0 strategy and incorporating elements, such as social features and highly-interactive elements to the design. Listen to their stories of helpi

At the beginning of this month, we had Joshua Porter in the office to present his Design for Sign-up talk. Designing for sign-up should be simple, yet it's often the most challenging area of your design. Josh had some great ideas on how to increase the

We recently had our friend Patrick Hofmann a designer with Google Australia in for a Virtual Seminar covering the Essentials of Effective Visual Design. His wealth of knowledge from his years of design and usability research into visual design provided

If you ask designers what the most frustrating parts about designing a project are, one of the top answers would undoubtedly be "communicating and documenting the design process." And with good reason... it's not easy.
That's why I interviewed Dan Brown

Back in October we had the good fortune to host Dana Chisnell's popular Virtual Seminar entitled "The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild", where she told us you don't have to run usability tests by the book to g

We recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On August 14, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar - Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site. During the seminar, we received far more questions than time would allow

What is the difference between good and great interaction designers?
That is the subject matter for this week’s show, which features a compelling conversation with Kim Goodwin. Kim is the VP of Design and General Manager at Cooper, one of the world’

Innovation has become such a buzzword, it's nearly meaningless. But that doesn't mean innovation itself is dead. In this week’s show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of "The Myths of Innovation."

The Agile development process is about breaking things into small pieces and acting on each piece really quickly. Yet, traditional user experience practices aren't used to working fast. How do we adjust our practices to survive in a fast-paced agile pro

“Can you make the logo bigger?” Heard that one before? So have we. This week, we talk with Yahoo!'s Luke Wroblewski, an expert on visual design on the web, about the misconceptions that about around this topic!

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. On July 17, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of a Web Page—The Five Types of Navigation Pages. During the seminar, we received far more q

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week's show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator

Brian Christiansen and I recorded a special episode comprised entirely of questions from our customers. Last week, we held the UIE Virtual Seminar: The Scent of Information: Getting Users to Their Content. During the seminar, we received far more questi

This week, our good friend Peter Merholz joins us for the show. Peter is president of the noted experience strategy and design consultancy Adaptive Path.
In our discussion, I asked Peter about mapping out a product's evolution. Launching a product is no